


In the Country

by therev



Category: Nathan Barley (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-02 08:29:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/366994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therev/pseuds/therev
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first thing Dan does once he can walk again properly is to move to the country.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Country

The first thing he does once he can walk again properly is to move to the country. He doesn’t even know that’s where he’s going. He puts everything he owns, very little when he stands back and looks at it piled together, into a taxi and asks the man to just drive, out of town, he doesn’t care where. The driver hesitates until Dan tosses a wad of Barley’s money at him, money from that awful show, that awful success, and even if Dan didn’t want it pounds are pounds and he’s taken money from worse even than Barley. The driver must feel the same and soon the city, the idiots, are behind them.

He ends up in a little village. He doesn’t even bother to find out the name until he’s been there several days, shut in a room with quaint little pastoral paintings and more sunlight beaming through the drapes than he’s sure is good for a person. He’s pissed most of the time.

After a while he takes a cottage, gets a job writing for the local publication, learns a lot about farming. He writes about the weather and poultry.

He sleeps with headphones for the first month or so, one of Jones’ CDs. Gradually he finds himself dozing off without it, having forgot it, until eventually he loses the CD and sells his headphones to a young girl for a pack of cigarettes and some chewing gum.  
___________

The next summer he writes Claire. He no longer owns a mobile. She doesn’t write back, just shows up. Barley isn’t with her. She’s relieved at first, to see him alright, then she’s furious for a while, then he hands her two thousand pounds.

“You been prostitutin’ yourself again? Tossin’ off farmers?” she asks.

“Every day,” he says, but he’s smiling, and she looks at him like he’s grown a foot out of his face.

She returns again late one Friday evening closer to Christmas, Jones in tow.

“Alright Dan,” Jones says, grinning, setting down bags by the door. He’s changed his hair. It’s a little longer, a little wilder. There’s bits of color in it.

Dan nods at him.

That evening they all get pissed at a pub filled with old farmers and young farmers and farmers’ wives, as well as a few kids destined to be farmers. They all seem to know Dan and Claire remarks on it.

“You’re well-liked ‘round here, aren’t you?”

Dan shrugs, the motion nudging Jones who’s snugged up beside him in the tight booth. “I tell them when to plant and when to watch for frost. The thing is, they’re the ones who tell me, I just put it in black and white and they like the reassurance of seeing their own words staring back at them from a publication.”

“You are a prostitute,” Claire says.

Jones smiles into his pint.  
__________

Claire takes his bed. He and Jones sit up in the quiet house, so unlike Jones’ flat, loud and lively and animated.

“You’ve got to be bored off your tits,” Dan says at last. Jones looks up at him, grinning and drunk where he’s folded himself up at the opposite end of the settee from Dan.

“I quite like it, actually. It’s well quiet.”

“You don’t like quiet. You’re the arch nemesis of quiet.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“S’alright. It’s why I was your flatmate so long.”

Jones smiles secretly, inspecting the material of his trousers. “Yeah, I know.”

“Thought you might.”  
_________

Sasha comes not long after the new year. He takes her to his editor’s house for a dinner he’s promised to attend for weeks. She goes over well and doesn’t seem out of place like Claire and Jones had. His editor, also a sheep farmer, winks at him over their lamb, and sends them off with an armload of assorted cheeses.

“Was that the equivalent of taking me out on your expense account?” she asks him later over wine in his front room.

“I think in this place it was more like taking you on a holiday in the French countryside.”

She smiles, sitting almost exactly where Jones had sat. Her hair hasn’t changed since he’d left. She’s as lovely as ever, as lovely as she had been every day at Sugar Ape, the only face he’d been glad to see. As lovely as she had been in hospital, even when he’d told her to get the fuck out and not come back, even when she had come back and wordlessly accepted his lack of apology.

He touches her hand where it’s stretched out toward him on the back of the settee, she returns the gesture. When she smiles radiantly he realizes it’s because he’s smiling, too.

“That looks good on you,” she says, moves to sit near him, kiss him. She smells like the best parts of the city and a light, expensive perfume.

In the morning, his hands warm on her goose-pimpled skin, she asks him a question as she smiles up at him.

“What?” he asks.

“When will you come back?”

“Not ever,” he says, bends to kiss her throat.

“What, never?

“Yeah.”

“Well I hoped…” She says, but she never says what she’d hoped, and he doesn’t ask. She leaves that afternoon, still smiling but different.

“Another trip to the French countryside sometime?” he asks. But she only kisses him again and tells him to take care.  
__________

Jones writes him. More precisely Jones sends him random bits of paper with things scribbled on them, and magazine clippings and bits of newpapers and adverts glued together. He draws Dan on some of them, a little mustachioed character with pens for arms.

One day mid-year Claire sends him a flier for one of Jones’ gigs, clearly an invitation. That same day he gets a letter from Jones, but it’s just a little drawing of Dan plowing the countryside with his pen arms, planting bits of his brain in the soil and raising newspaper trees.  
__________

It’s been almost two years since he left by the time he finds himself standing in the midst of a sea of idiots, mad-faced and babbling, body-popping and convorting in some sort of random collection of movements they clearly consider to be dancing. Jones is at the front of them, but they might as well not be there, he doesn’t pay them any mind, eyes only for the decks and his dolls and little plastic friends, all crucial to the sound somehow. And the sound is good.

“Alright, Dan,” Jones says around six a.m. the next morning after finding Dan on his sofa. Dan nods, waking up, the greeting so familiar he might as well have never left.

He’d come back to the flat straight after the show. He’d found his key sometime last year, in a dirty pair of trousers at the bottom of a box of hastily-packed clothing. As he had suspected, the locks had been unchanged. Jones doesn’t really seem surprised to see him.

“You were at the show,” Jones says, collapses onto the sofa next to Dan. He looks tired and Dan wonders when he last slept.

“I didn’t think you’d notice,” Dan says, “eyes on the decks.”

“’Course I did. But Claire ain’t here anymore, mate.”

“I know,” Dan says.

“Right,” Jones says almost shyly, “coffee?”

“No thanks.”

“I’ll have one, I’m well knackered.”

“It’s on me. Just pop ‘round the corner,” Dan offers, standing and straightening his wrinkled clothing.

“Cheers, mate, I’ll come with,” Jones says but Dan waves him off and by the time he’s back with the coffees, one for himself afterall, Jones is asleep.  
_________

He has lunch with Claire. The upside to Barley’s inexplicable success is that he’s too busy making an even bigger twat of himself for television to have time to haunt the streets, the pubs, the shops with his buffoonery. It’s a small comfort.

“He’s miserable,” Claire tells him, grinning, “it’s fantastic.”

“Never thought I’d wish him success,” Dan says.

“To Nathan’s enduring fame,” she says and they raise their glasses. “Jones is doing well, too. I’m glad you came to see him.”

Dan nods, eating silently.

“He asks about you all the time. I think he misses having a captive audience.”

Dan’s nodding again but says, “I never realized how shoddy these local vegetables are compared to fresh country ones.”

“You know he quit playing all night not long after you left.”

Dan considers this, says, “The beef is better as well.”  
________

Jones is freshly showered and wide awake when Dan returns to the flat that afternoon, he’s unpacking his gear and grins at Dan from behind the tables.

“Private party?” Jones asks.

“Not sleepy,” Dan says and Jones laughs knowingly.

They get takeaway and open a few beers and though they don’t say much Dan feels they’re catching up. Jones plays a few experimental pieces for him, classic Jones method-to-the-madness sort of stuff. Dan listens patiently, tells him which bits he likes and likes less.

“What’s this?” Dan asks, thumbing through CDRs crammed into a shoebox. He holds up one that reads ‘Dan In Hospital’ in Jones’s artistic lettering.

Jones squints at it, then turns off the voice effects that makes him sound like a chainsmoking cyborg so that his own voice seems small and quiet in comparison. “Just sommin’ I knocked up while you was in hospital.”

Dan flips through the others. ‘Dan’s haircut’ one reads, ‘Dan Out a Window’ says another. ‘Dan Asleep on the Sofa’, ‘Dan Going Mad’, ‘Dan In the Country’. There are a few that say something like ‘Claire Loses Camera’ and ‘Barley is Rubbish’, but most of them feature Dan.

“Could I hear one?” Dan asks.

“They’re pretty rough,” Jones says, but obliges when Dan hands him ‘Dan In Hospital’, then sits next to Dan on the sofa, watching the walls and the floor, his hands in his lap.

“It’s quite melancholy,” Dan says after a while, though he’s not sure how he can tell that from all the chaos spilling out of the speakers. It’s there, though, beneath the beats and the noise.

Jones nods, finally looks at Dan, eyes huge and round. “It weren’t exactly an occasion for a brass band.”

“Yeah.”

“I got another for when you wrote your “Idiots” piece and everyone was so keen on it. It’s well celebratory.”

“No,” Dan says, “I like this one.”  
______

Dan stays the night again. He’ll be off in the morning. By the time he’s dead tired Jones is showing him a scrapbook of his gigs, photos of crowds. Dan’s in a few of them. They’re sitting close, the book spread across Dan’s lap as Jones turns the pages, when Dan nods off, head lolling to the sofa back. But it isn’t that contact that wakes him, nor the feel of the scrapbook sliding out of his hands as Jones takes it away, nor even the shift beside him as Jones fetches a throw and covers them both with it. Instead it’s the warmth at the corner of his mouth when Jones kisses him.

He doesn’t open his eyes at first. Perhaps it was a simpler gesture than he imagines. But it comes again, coupled with a hand on his chest. When it happens again he opens his eyes and Jones sits back with a start.

“Thought you was asleep,” Jones says.

“I thought you might,” Dan replies simply, admiring the blush on the other man’s cheeks. It occurs to him that he’d seen it before, though he’d never examined why. It occurs to him also that these might not have been the first kisses stolen during their long acquaintance.

“You got anything against me bein’ awake for it?” he asks.

Jones smiles.  
__________

The next Christmas Jones and Claire come again to the country, arms filled with gifts and bags.

They watch sappy Christmas movies and get bundled up for a parade involving more animals than people, and a living nativity with sheep in place of the ox and ass, and a duck instead of a dove.

Christmas Eve Claire takes the bed as always. Dan and Jones sit side-by-side on the settee before a fire, snogging like there’s no tomorrow after more or less behaving for Claire all day. They’ve already exchanged gifts. Jones is wearing the scarf Dan gave him and he’s wrapped the ends around Dan’s neck as well. Dan’s gift from Jones tumbles quietly chaotic from the stereo speakers, a sweet tune beneath the cacophony of unintelligible lyrics, interjected with lively trumpet blasts here and there. The title on the disc reads: ‘Dan and Jones Get Off.’

Dan knows every note by heart.


End file.
